Hasnain says:

“The IRS says Microsoft owes an additional $28.9 billion in tax for 2004 to 2013, plus penalties and interest. “

Hasnain says:

“and eventually peaked just above 201 million requests per second. This was nearly 3x bigger than our previous biggest attack on record.

Concerning is the fact that the attacker was able to generate such an attack with a botnet of merely 20,000 machines. There are botnets today that are made up of hundreds of thousands or millions of machines. Given that the entire web typically sees only between 1–3 billion requests per second, it's not inconceivable that using this method could focus an entire web’s worth of requests on a small number of targets.”

Hasnain says:

I felt this in my bones (the whole piece, not just the quote - though the quote made me chuckle). Great piece as always from Julia on how to learn and share information and how we can make tech simpler.

“There's this "today I learned" person who's into sharing cool new tools they learned about, a bug that they ran into, or a great new-to-them library feature.

There's the person who has read the entire Internet and has 700 tabs open. If you want to know where to find something, there's a good chance they already have it open in their browser.”

Hasnain says:

Great post. Revised some virtual memory knowledge, learnt a lot more about kernel internals and performance optimizations.

“In our case, this concludes our optimization journey for our little synthetic benchmark, from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s.”

Hasnain says:

Been following the news over the last day and it’s so depressing. Such a complex situation and so hard to put my feelings and opinions into just a few words. I hope there is an end to the senseless suffering and violence inflicted upon innocent civilians. Right now it doesn’t sound like that is going to happen anytime soon :(

“The United States will move an aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean Sea while providing munitions and other equipment to help Israel in its newly declared war against Hamas. U.S. officials expect the Israeli government to launch a ground incursion into the densely populated Gaza Strip in the next 24 to 48 hours. Israel has been pounding Gaza with strikes, promising retaliation for an unprecedented attack by the militant group that took Israeli security forces by surprise. The death toll has risen to 700 in Israel and thousands have been injured, according to local media, while Palestinian authorities said at least 413 were killed and about 2,300 injured in Gaza. At least 260 bodies were recovered at the site of a music festival near the Gaza border in southern Israel, which was attacked by Hamas on Saturday, Israeli media reported. Fears of a regional spillover grew after Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said it attacked Israeli targets near the border “in solidarity” with Hamas and Israel said it struck back.”

Hasnain says:

Found myself nodding and chuckling.

“From the Tao of Programming:

A novice asked the Master: "In the East, there is a great tree-structure that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go Hence!' or 'Go Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity exist?"

The Master replied: "You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"”

Hasnain says:

“I have now run out of layers: before this point, clocks were set more straightforwardly by watching stars cross the sky

so, to summarise my talk, where does my computer get the time from?

it does not get it from the Royal Greenwich Observatory!”

Hasnain says:

“I can see both side of the arguments on many topics, such as vim vs. emacs, tabs vs. spaces, and even much more controversial ones. Though in this case, the costs are so low compared to the benefits that I just don't understand why anyone would ever choose not to use types.

I'd love to know what I'm missing, but until then: Strong typing is a hill I'm willing to die on.”

Hasnain says:

“The Rust compiler is pedantic. It is the most obsessive code reviewer you have worked with5. If you pass a 32-bit integer to a function that expects a 64-bit integer, it will not let you. If you try to share a non-threadsafe data structure across threads your compile will fail. Ignore the fact that filesystem paths may be arbitrary bytes and try to use them as UTF-8 strings? Straight to compiler jail.

Some people will love this about Rust. Others—who just want to get something working dammit—will hate it.

Put me in the first camp. I've spent enough time in my career debugging hard-to-reproduce bugs in production. This involves more upfront design work, and some frustration fighting with the compiler. But once you've satisfied it, the code ends up being correct an astonishingly high fraction of the time.”

Hasnain says:

““My paternal grandmother’s legacy lives on in the khatta-meeta nimbu achar [salty-sweet lemon pickle] she made a month before she passed away in September 2001,” said Vernika Awal, a food writer based in the Delhi National Capital Region who has only 250 grammes (8.8oz) left in a 1kg (2.2lb) bottle that is now 22 years old.

From what Vernika recalls of the process, her Punjabi family uses lemons with a slightly hard peel. They are mixed with ajwain, khand (powdered jaggery), black salt and table salt. Mustard oil, heated to smoking point, is added. The mix is then put out in the sun.

“We eat this sparingly … and through it recall the memory my grandmother, feeling her presence even after two decades. … It’s a physical form of memory, savouring something made so long ago,” she added.”